Gift wrapping and delivery near you

Wrapping is the larger half of this by some distance. A stack of presents, an evening, and a pair of hands that are better at it than yours are. It gets booked hardest in the fortnight before a December deadline and around every other gift-giving date in the year. What makes a wrapping task quotable is boringly specific: how many items, roughly what shapes — boxes take a minute, bottles, bicycles and soft toys do not — whether you are supplying paper and tags or want them bought to a brief, whether anything needs writing on, and whether it happens at your kitchen table or the pile goes away and comes back.

Getting it there is mostly about the handover rather than the distance — the driving argument belongs to our delivery page. The thing that goes wrong is arriving when nobody is in, which turns a gift into a parcel on a dark porch, so agree the fallback before the day: a neighbour, a second attempt, or the concierge if the building will take it. Ask about that last one first, because plenty of buildings will not accept an item at the desk from anybody who is not a courier on their list, and the workaround is usually that the recipient comes down — which is not much of a surprise. Anything perishable has a clock on it: chocolate in summer, flowers at any time, anything that has to stay cold.